Achieving agility through case management

In today’s challenging economy, organisations must be more agile and work smarter in order to create value for their customers quickly. A recent survey of 350 executives conducted by The Economist magazine found that over the next three years, the number one business challenge for over half of the respondents was reducing operational costs.

The study also revealed that nearly 90 percent of executives believe that organisational agility is critical to business success. These executives identified three critical traits of an agile business: rapid decision making and execution, a high-performance culture, and the ability to access the right information at the right time.

Organisations have been mandated to operate with fewer resources, yet are still expected to deliver superior services while increasing efficiency and productivity. As a result, they can no longer tolerate the inefficiencies of limited information access and manual, time-consuming processes. Organizations need to transform their critical business processes and leverage multiple sources of information to adopt a better way of working.

To make this transformation a reality, leading organisations have turned to case management solutions to reduce operational costs and organisational risk, acquire and retain customers, improve decision making, and process work faster and more effectively.

Case management allows organisations to automate routine tasks and aggregate multiple sources of information in a collaborative work environment for rapid decision-making, while improving their agility and efficiency.

Working smarter with case management

Manual processes outlive their usefulness

Many of today’s organisations process cases manually, making cases difficult to manage, track, and control. Case files can be lost, misplaced, or mishandled, resulting in failure to meet operational and service performance goals, and/or regulatory mandates. In addition, maintaining physical case folders increases the time and cost associated with processing each case.

For many reasons, traditional, paper-based methods for case processing are no longer viable. First, the proliferation of information produced for each case and the variety of formats in which this information is submitted (both paper and electronic files such as forms, images, video, and audio content) make manual processing inefficient and prone to risk. This accumulated data also makes searching case-relevant information difficult.

Second, today’s global and mobile workforce cannot collaborate or consult efficiently through paper-based methods which require the physical transfer of case files from location to location for review.

Finally, governance and regulatory compliance requirements necessitate the retention of full documentation for each use, including how and why decisions were reached, discussion threads, policies reviewed, and opinions rendered.

Moving to a virtual case environment

Without greater control of case information organizations cannot improve their agility and efficiency. Improving case management through case processing requires integrating people, processes, and information; automating structured processes; and expediting the unstructured case processes – all while fostering more collaboration among case workers.

For example, capturing case information electronically allows organisations to eliminate manual data entry, misplaced information, and related data entry errors. This action can then initiate the creation of a virtual case folder that aggregates all digital information relevant to the case (e-mails, faxes, forms information, images, audio and video files, photographs, policies, discussion threads, and collaborations). It is this virtual case file that becomes the focal point for each case.

With a secure virtual case folder – the cornerstone of case processing – workers can easily collaborate with other business users, independent of their geographic location. The folder view includes tasks, rules and policies, events, history, reporting, documents, people, and even other processes, providing the necessary context to make the most accurate decisions quickly.

By moving to a virtual case environment, organizations readily gain access to case information that is up-to-date, tracked, and visible across the organisation. Workers have a holistic view of their work form beginning to end as well as a sense of ownership.

With all information and its context aggregated into a single folder, workers can consult internal and external resources, and review and make better decisions to resolve the case.

A virtual case folder also enables tasks that would require sequential processing to be done in parallel, speeding case resolution.

How it works

Case processing involves process and content management; intelligent capture; monitoring and reporting; collaboration; personalised customer communications; and compliance and archiving. Data and documents are transformed into digital assets and managed in virtual case folder for the entire case lifecycle.

Adopting a case processing strategy that involves the complete case lifecycle – from incoming information captures to communication of the final resolution or status to customers or stakeholders – is crucial to success. Some organisations fail to meet their case processing goals because they focus on only one element of the equation.

To manage the flow of activities within a case, managers should be able to easily track processes toward milestones, productivity goals, and service level agreements. Case processing also automates simple and repetitive tasks to enable workers to focus on more complex work. It allows organisations to:

• Decrease processing time by eliminating the need to locate and physically transport information stored in various areas and locations.
• Monitor and control case processing through real time reports and dashboards.
• Give workers the ability to interact and participate in real-time discussions.
• Provide security and information rights management to the contents of the virtual case folder.
• Apply retention policies and records management to meet government mandates and regulatory guidelines.

More cases can be resolved faster by using automated and streamlined business process, and by incorporating business policies and business models. By ensuring more efficient access to information, case processing provides improved worker productivity, increased work visibility, enhanced service delivery, controlled compliance, and enforced retention policies.

Excerpted from Case Management: A Blueprint for Success. How case management can create business agility and efficiency. © 2009 EMC Corporation. The expanded white paper is available for download at www.emcindia.co.in/ctoforum

Edited by Falguni Sarkar, Head of Marketing for Content Management and Archiving Products for South Asia at EMC Corporation.

Table 1: Case-based business processes across various industries